Book Image

Mastering OpenLayers 3

By : Gábor Farkas
Book Image

Mastering OpenLayers 3

By: Gábor Farkas

Overview of this book

OpenLayers 3 allows you to create stunning web mapping and WebGIS applications. It uses modern, cutting edge browser technologies. It is written with Closure Library, enabling you to build browser-independent applications without painful debugging ceremonies, which even have some limited fallback options for older browsers. With this guide, you will be introduced to the world of advanced web mapping and WebGIS. First, you will be introduced to the advanced features and functionalities available in OpenLayers 3. Next, you will be taken through the key points of creating custom applications with OpenLayers 3. You will then learn how to create the web mapping application of yours (or your company's) dream with this open source, expense-free, yet very powerful library. We’ll also show you how to make amazing looking thematic maps and create great effects with canvas manipulation. By the end of this book, you will have a strong command of web mapping and will be well on your way to creating amazing applications using OpenLayers 3.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering OpenLayers 3
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

3D rendering with Cesium


In our final example, called ch09_cesium, we will integrate Cesium into our application. Cesium is a 3D web mapping application, capable of rendering ordinary OWS layers and features on a globe and creating DEM visualizations with elevation tiles. It can display various spatial data in 2D and 3D, knows some projections, and on top of visualizing elevation data, it can also render 3D objects using various 3D-capable formats.

The only problem with Cesium is that it would be very hard to synchronize with OpenLayers 3. Luckily, the OpenLayers 3 developer team created an integration library, which can utilize the 3D capabilities of Cesium. The downside of this approach is the limitation of the capabilities of Cesium. We can use the 3D renderer, Web Mercator, and the WGS84 projections (EPSG:3857 and EPSG:4326), and we can access the currently used Cesium scene. The library automatically synchronizes the scene with our OpenLayers 3 map, and if we know how to use Cesium,...